The Pennsylvania State University - Division of Development & Alumni Relations

"The Imaging Project"

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From a small town agricultural college to a world-renowned learning institution, the history of The Pennsylvania State University is one of an increasing commitment to teaching, research, and civic support. To help meet these intense demands, Penn State has looked to philanthropy for additional resources. Through major gift fund-raising, Penn State can continue its goal of strengthening academic programs and broadening the University's service to the Commonwealth and beyond.

One such source for these funds is Penn State’s alumni and friends. Penn State is literally second to none in the entire nation in the number of alumni making gifts annually to their universities. As a matter of fact, the Penn State Alumni Association, with a powerful network of more than 146,000 members, is the largest due–paying alumni association in the country.

Tracking this tremendous flow of gifts from numerous alumni donors is the Division of Development and Alumni Relations, with its “Imaging Project” – an electronic document management solution that is helping the department decrease costs and increase efficiency.

The Need and the Solution

The Division of Development and Alumni Relations processes and stores massive volumes of information related to donors and the donations they make to the University. Two main elements produce this mass amount of paper - Donor Files and Gift Processing

PART ONE – Donor Files

The first part of the Imaging Project relates to the document storage and retrieval system for Penn State’s Donor Files. In the donor files area, officials determined that document storage and retrieval were critical processes that needed to be implemented. Penn State’s paper donor files had over 400,000 stored documents. They needed to find a system that would allow back file and new file conversion to electronic images, and at the same time it was mandatory for the system to provide easy access for many users.

"In order to operate efficiently, it is imperative that we keep track of all of the information on our donors," explains Mark Rudloff, Senior Systems Analyst within the Division of Development and Alumni Relations. "And most importantly, that information needs to be easy to access at the touch of a button. We needed to implement a solution that would meet all of our needs."

The answer to these needs was found within Optical Image Technology’s (OIT) document imaging module, DocFinity® Imaging, and a custom Web application for document retrieval. In the donor files area, document storage and retrieval are very critical processes. Imaging allowed the department to create a system that solved space requirements while providing easy, but very secure access.

"OIT's DocFinity Imaging module provided the division with the flexibility it needed to incorporate document imaging into its overall application," commented Scott Buchart, President of OIT.

In order to initiate this project, the department first worked on cleaning out all unnecessary documents, leaving approximately 100,000 documents to back file scan. Currently, they continue to process and scan incoming documents into the system at a rate of more than 100 documents per day. This collection of imaged Donor Files, known to the department as “iFiles”, can be accessed via a Web interface.

The original project, which included designing the imaging system, designing the Web application, and then the back file scanning, took about one year. Linking it to the department’s legacy database by Business Systems Resources (BSR), via a separate Web application then enhanced the overall system and provides users with a complete donor profile.

Penn State has a long-standing relationship with OIT. “We had a lot of experience with our paper based processes and our existing systems; we have been able to build upon that expertise,” remarks Rudloff. “Even more important, OIT offers a complete suite of technology and has supported us in integrating its ‘DocFinity Solution’ with our existing systems. As a result, we’ve been able to transform our old paper based processes into more efficient and effective electronic document management solutions.”

PART TWO – Gift Processing

The second part of the Division of Development and Alumni Relations’ Imaging Project involves Gift Processing. Gift processing is a high volume, labor intensive and repetitive process that required a great deal of paper and copying. Limited space for people and file cabinets was also an issue.

"As initiatives like A Grand Destiny: The Penn State Campaign, which aims to raise $1.3 billion over seven years, continues to result in a tremendous increase in gifts to Penn State," noted Rudloff, "we knew that we needed a technological solution that would allow us to do more with less so we could continue to expand our gift processing capacity as the University grows."

To address these issues, the department decided to let the computers handle the volume and the repetitiveness and focus the people on quality control. This electronic Gift Processing system, known as “eCI-Gifts”, uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract up to 21 fields of data from scanned donor gift solicitations. The extracted data is used to populate the OIT cascade, user key, and the workflow key structure. The images are then indexed and stored in the OIT system.

Using DocFinity WorkFlow, OIT’s workflow module, they analyze and sort the gift data into multiple workflows. These workflows are used to move the gifts through the process, making intelligent decisions about the correctness of the information, thus automating and streamlining the process. If incorrect or missing data is found, the gift is sent to a person for correction. Therefore, some of the workflows require people to correct gift data, while others automate the gift processing. Nearly 75% of the gifts scanned are processed by the system without manual intervention.

At the end of the day, all of the gifts that have been run through eCI-Gifts and are completed automatically get uploaded to BSR for final processing. Next Day reporting is provided to ensure data accuracy. To date, eCI-Gifts has processed more than 35,000 gifts, and has a peak capacity of 1,000 gifts per day.

Products Used Within the Solution

The solution implemented within Penn State’s Division of Development and Alumni Relations included the following components:

OIT’s Imaging Module, DocFinity Imaging
OIT’s Workflow Module, DocFinity WorkFlow
iFiles (WEB based Donor File Retrieval System) By Raytheon
eCI-Gift (Electronic Gift Processing System)
Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 (SQL)
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
Mti - OCR for Forms
Custom Post Processing and Upload Program By Raytheon
VeriSign Encryption
Kodak 3500d Scanner
Fujitsu 3093 Scanners
Kofax Adrenaline Card
Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0

Benefits – Why Imaging?

Information is every organization's most valuable asset. Unfortunately, no matter how much data an organization stores, it has no business value unless users can readily find, retrieve and apply its content as needed. Since implementing the “Imaging Project”, Penn State’s Division of Development and Alumni Relations has experienced far-reaching benefits. The OIT software suite has helped to reduce the storage space requirements for documents and the amount of time required to process and retrieve documents.

"The automated workflow imaging system that we implemented using the OIT software made it possible for a significant portion of the data within our office to be processed with minimal human intervention," reports Rudloff. "Actually, almost 75% of the gifts we receive and scan are processed by the system without manual intervention." Rudloff adds, "That's an impressive increase in efficiency, which has allowed us to focus our people on improving other areas within the department."

The implemented system provides instant access to vital donor information for the Development staff. Much of the paper has been completely eliminated from the process by using on-screen processing. It has also helped to reduce file cabinet storage space tremendously. The system provides a platform for donor file storage that is easy to backup for disaster recovery.

"We are very proud that OIT's DocFinity Solution could be a part of the department's pioneering Imaging Project," added Buchart. "The benefits they are experiencing are monumental, and should be applauded."

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